Palestinians search in the rubble of a destroyed house where eight members of the Al Haj family were killed in a strike early morning in Khan Younis refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip on Thursday, July 10, 2014By Jeff HalperThe Kerry initiative may have ended with a whimper instead of a bang, but its impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was significant and fundamental nonetheless. The end of the political process, futile as it may have been, triggered the collapse of the status quo as we have known it for the past 47 years. It set in motion a series of events that will confront us with two stark alternatives regarding Israel and Palestine: either the permanent warehousing of an entire population or the emergence of a single democratic state. Both the blatantly disproportionate response to the kidnapping and killing of the three Israeli boys and, as I write, the all-out air strikes on Gaza, have been cast by Israel as military operations: Operations Brothers’ Keeper and Operation Protective Edge. Neither had anything to do with the operations’ purported triggers, the search for the boys or rocket fire from Gaza. Palestinian cities supposedly enjoying extra-territorial status were invaded in Operation Brothers’ Keeper, more than 2000 homes were ransacked, some 700 people arrested. Who knows as yet the devastation wrought on Gaza – 100 dead in more than 1,100 air attacks so far, mostly civilians according to reports; deafening around-the-clock bombing of communities by American-supplied F-15 and artillery from the ground and sea that amounts to collective torture; Israel’s Foreign Minister calling for cutting off all electricity and water amidst threats to completely obliterate Gaza’s infrastructure; and the prospect of almost two million people being permanently imprisoned, reduced to bare existence just this side of starvation. What is clear is that the military operations had a purpose of their own, that they would have been launched regardless, that they were merely waiting on a pretext. They had to come because the vacuum left by Kerry had to be filled. “Closure” was necessary – and it was clear that the Palestinian Authority, which had several months to take an initiative that would have bolstered the Palestinians’ position, would not do so, even though Martin Indyk, the American’s chief negotiator and former AIPAC leader, placed the blame squarely on Israel for talks’ failure. In fact, the end of the Kerry initiative marked the culmination of a decades-old campaign, systematic and deliberate, of eliminating the two-state solution. From the start, in 1967, successive Israeli governments officially denied that there even was an occupation, claiming that since the Palestinians had never had a state of their own they had no national claim to the land. The Labor Party denied the very applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention that protects civilian populations finding themselves under hostile rule with no means of self-defense – and which had been formulated specifically with the intent of providing the protection denied to Jews during the Holocaust. It therefore embarked on a project of establishing settlements, now numbering some 200, in clear violation of international law that prohibits an Occupying Power from moving its civilian population into an occupied territory. Indeed, Labor (the “Zionist left”) bears more responsibility for eliminating the two-state solution than does the Likud of Begin, Sharon and Netanyahu. It was Labor who ruled during almost all seven years of the Oslo peace process, and it was Labor that chose to double Israel’s settler population during that period. Labor fragmented the Palestinian territories into tiny and impoverished enclaves, Labor imposed the economic closure and impediments to Palestinian movement these last 21 years, and Labor – not Likud, which actually opposed the project – initiated the construction of the Separation Barrier, the Apartheid Wall. The Likud, of course, was a willing partner, as were all the secular and religious parties from the center to the extreme right, but it has fallen to Netanyahu to kill the two-state solution for once and for all. The first step was to decisively end Kerry’s initiative and any that might follow it. This Netanyahu did by raising his demands to intolerable levels. He declared that the Palestinians must relinquish their own national narrative and civil rights by recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, and he held to the position that Israel would retain permanently East Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and Israel’s main settlement blocs (about a third of the West Bank), as well as the water and natural gas resources, the country’s electro-magnetic sphere (communications) and all of its airspace. He left the Palestinians with less than a Bantustan, non-viable and non-sovereign, a prison comprised of the 70 islands of Areas A and B of the West Bank, ghettos in “east” Jerusalem, tightly contained enclaves within Israel, and he cage which is Gaza – half the population of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River confined to dozens of islands on 15% of historic Palestine. Operations Brothers’ Keeper and Protective Edge represent the imposition of a regime of warehousing, of outright imprisonment of an entire people. The seemingly blind and atavistic destruction and hatred unleashed on the Palestinians over the past few weeks is not merely yet another “round of violence” in an interminable struggle. It is the declaration of a new political reality. The message is clear, unilateral and final: This country has been Judaized: it is now the Land of Israel in the process of being incorporated into the state of Israel. You Arabs (or “Palestinians” as you call yourselves) are not a people and have no national rights, certainly to our exclusively Jewish country. You are not a “side” to a “conflict.” Once and for all we must disabuse you of the notion that we are actually negotiating with you. We never have and never will. You are nothing but inmates in prison cells, and we hereby declare through our military and political actions that you have three options before you: You can submit as inmates are required to you, in which case we will allow you to remain in your enclave-cells. You can leave, as hundreds of thousands have done before you. Or, if you choose to resist, you will die. Warehousing is worse than apartheid. It does not even pretend to find a political framework for “separate development,” it simply jails the oppressed and robs them of all their collective and individual rights. It is the ultimate form of oppression before actual genocide, and in that it robs a people of its identity, its land, its culture and the ability to reproduce itself, it is a form of cultural genocide that can lead to worse. This is what Israel has left the Palestinians, this is the meaning of the bombing of Gaza, the terrorizing of the West Bank – and the ongoing destruction of Bedouin and Palestinian homes within Israel. Assuming that apartheid and warehousing are absolutely unacceptable “solutions” and, indeed, are ultimately unsustainable, generating even more violence and conflict in the volatile Middle East, Israel has in fact left us with only one workable, just and lasting way out: a single democratic state in Palestine/Israel that guarantees the individual and collective rights of all its citizens. This is what we must struggle for. Israel’s military operations mark the beginning of the collapse of the Occupation. It is incumbent on Palestinian civil society, joining with their partners on the critical Israeli left, to urgently formulate how that state would look and, ensuring everyone in that land a part in its future, to begin the struggle to achieve it. Despite the suffering of the moment, public opinion the world over support us. Only our effective mobilization will defeat warehousing.About Jeff Halper Jeff Halper is the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He can be reached at jeff@icahd.org. View all posts by Jeff Halper →

“The blood of a dialysis patient in Gaza is not redder than the blood of our IDF [Israeli army] soldiers who will, God forbid, need to enter [Gaza],” said Moshe Feiglin, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, on Wednesday. “Therefore I call on the prime minister who we all support in this difficult hour, before we send the IDF into Gaza, we should simply shut down their electricity,” he added. Feiglin made these calls for war crimes – heard in the video above – during a session from which he expelled three Palestinian members for criticizing Israel’s full-scale bombardment of Gaza which has claimed more than one hundred Palestinian lives since Monday.

A member of Israeli prime minister’s ruling Likud party, Feiglin has long been an activist in radical Jewish organizations that aim to replace occupied Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque with a Jewish “Third Temple.”

During the same session, another member of parliament stated that Israeli missiles were good for Palestinians in Gaza. These comments are in tune with an atmosphere of intense incitement that has included lawmaker Ayelet Shaked taking to Facebook to call for genocide of the Palestinian people.

Arab members forcibly silenced The nearly 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel have the right to vote and be elected to the Knesset, a fact that Israel apologists often use to claim that Israel is an exemplary democracy.

But as demonstrated by the segments in the video above, edited and subtitled by Boycott from Within activist Ronnie Barkan, freedom of expression only goes so far.

When lawmaker Ibrahim Sarsour of the United Arab List party condemned Israel’s attack on Gaza, Feiglin orders guards to forcibly remove him from the podium and expel him.

“Those who refer to Israeli soldiers as murderers will not stay here another second,” Feiglin states.

The video shows Ahmed Tibi of the Arab Movement for Change condemning the incitement by Israeli leaders and rabbis that led to the 2 July kidnap and murder of Palestinian teen Muhammad Abu Khudair. He reads the names of Palestinian children killed in the bombing of Gaza while he is constantly heckled.

“The IDF is committing war crimes,” Tibi charges.

Feiglin calls Tibi “the representative for the martyrs” and declares, “there are no war crimes.”

“Earlier today in the Knesset, I expelled 3 Arab MKs [Knesset members] from the plenum for calling our IDF soldiers ‘murderers,’” he wrote. “As long as I am in charge of the deliberations, nobody will get away with such lies.”

He also posted his own video of the expulsions (click the “cc” button to see English captions):

Missiles are good for Gaza Elazar Stern, a former general and a member of justice minister Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah (“The Movement”) party, responds that “saying that IDF soldiers are murderers is incitement.” Stern denies the well-documented fact that Israel fires missiles at houses with families inside. “We only shoot when we know that one mother is destined to cry,” he says. “I’m telling you that if a mother has to cry I’d rather it be the mother of the person trying to kill me and not my mother.” Still, Stern insisted that bombing Gaza was an act of benevolence on Israel’s part.

“When we shoot at a house in Gaza, it is also in order for Gazans to live better,” he states.

“I’m telling you that the missiles we shoot into Gaza are not only to save lives in Tel Aviv and Asheklon but also to save lives in Gaza,” he adds.

Seventy-seven percent of the people killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza which began on Monday were civilians, according to the UN.[PDF]

Relatives and friends of the al-Hajj family gather in a mosque to pray over the bodies of eight family members during their funeral in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on July 10, 2014Sixteen Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes since midnight Friday, Gaza's Ministry of Health said, bringing the death toll in Israel's military assault to over 100.

The latest airstrikes and shelling targeted the al-Nizar neighborhood in al-Shujaiyya in eastern Gaza City late Friday, killing two people.

Spokesman for the ministry of health Ashraf al-Qidra said Hussein al-Mamlok, 47, and Saber Sukkar, 80 were killed and three others were injured in the strike.

Three others were injured, he said.

Medics say the attacks raised the death toll to 106 since the campaign began.

According to Gaza's Ministry of Health, over 100 Palestinians have been killed and at least 600 injured in Israel's assault on the besieged coastal enclave.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs published an emergency report documenting that 58 Palestinian civilians, including 11 women and 21 children, have been killed as of 3 p.m. Thursday during Israel's assault.

Over 300 homes have been totally destroyed or severely damaged and around 2,000 Gazans have been made homeless, OCHA added.

US President Barack Obama said he was concerned the fighting could escalate and "called for all sides to do everything they can to protect the lives of civilians", the White House said.

"The United States remains prepared to facilitate a cessation of
hostilities, including a return to the November 2012 ceasefire
agreement."

Appeals for an immediate truce also came from UN
chief Ban Ki-moon at an emergency meeting Thursday of the Security
Council, saying a ceasefire was "more urgent than ever".

Russian
President Vladimir Putin issued a similar plea in a phone call to
Netanyahu, urging an immediate end to the bloodshed and expressing
concern over civilian casualties.

Hamas has been striking deep
inside Israel over the past 48 hours, with rockets crashing down near
Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and even as far away as Hadera, 116 kilometers to
the north.

Senior Hamas member and the movement's former Gaza prime minister Ismail Haniyeh ruled out any backing down by the group.

"The
enemy (Israel) is the one that started this aggression and it must
stop, because we are (simply) defending ourselves," Haniyeh said in a
statement early Friday.

1090 sites bombed

Since the
start of the operation, the Israeli military's biggest offensive on
Gaza since November 2012, its forces have hit over 1090 sites in Gaza.

In
the same period, Gaza militants fired 407 mortars and rockets that
struck Israel, while another 118 rockets were intercepted, an army
spokeswoman said Friday.

Israel has approved the call-up of 40,000 reservists.

In
a news conference, Hamas' armed wing the al-Qassam Brigades issued a
veiled threat to kidnap soldiers, saying a "ground war will be a chance
to free Palestinian prisoners."

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri
said in a separate statement that Israel would "pay the price for its
crimes," saying an Israeli ground assault would be a mistake, calling
Israeli troops "cowards."

A further three children were confirmed dead today, bringing the total number of Gaza children killed this week to 21. The children died in a week that has seen the Israeli air force drop hundreds of missiles into crowded residential areas, killing and injuring large numbers of Palestinian civilians. On Wednesday, July 9, DCI-Palestine confirmed the deaths of seven children as a result of Israeli airstrikes. Today, Mariam Atiya Mohammad al-Arja, 9, was also confirmed to have died on July 9 when her family’s home in the southern Gaza town of Rafah was targeted. Mariam sustained a head injury when the home collapsed on her and her family. DCI-Palestine confirmed a further four deaths on Thursday, July 10. Abdul Rahman Bassam Abdul Rahman Khatab, 5, was confirmed as the fifth child killed on Thursday, struck in his lower torso by shrapnel that led to his immediate death. He had been at his uncle’s house in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza. Today, Nour Marwan Abdullah al-Najdi, 10, from Rafah, became the 21st child confirmed dead this week by DCI-Palestine. She was asleep when a rocket targeted a nearby house, causing the roof of her family’s home to collapse. She, too, died instantly. Israel continues to drop missiles on Gaza, despite the large number of casualties sustained by children.

The latest airstrike targeted the Tal al-Zaatar region of the northern Gaza Strip, killing a child, Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qodra told Anadolu Agency.The total number of Palestinians killed by Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip since Monday night has hit 103, including 26 children, the Palestinian Health Ministry said Friday. The latest airstrike targeted the Tal al-Zaatar region of the northern Gaza Strip, killing a child, Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qodra told Anadolu Agency. Around 750 Palestinians have also been injured since the Israeli military operation began late Monday, al-Qodra added. According to the ministry, most fatalities have involved Palestinian civilians, including 26 children and 11 women. Only seven resistance fighters, the ministry said, had been known to be killed in the strikes. Israeli warplanes have pounded the Gaza Strip over the past four days as part of a military offensive – dubbed "Operation Protective Edge" – with the stated aim of ending rocket fire from the embattled coastal enclave. Gaza-based resistance factions, meanwhile, have continued to fire rockets into Israel in response to the unrelenting airstrikes.

Israeli army warns Palestinians by phone to move out of their homes ahead of its 'imminent' incursionThe Israeli army has told 300,000 Gazans by phone to leave their houses ahead of its imminent incursion, the United Nations Agency for Palestine has said. United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on Friday the calls from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were reported in the North Area’s Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun, and in East Khan Younis. UNWRA said in a statement: "Beginning yesterday afternoon, Palestinian civilians were contacted over the phone in recorded messages from the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) asking them to leave their houses and move. "This tactic was used effectively by Israeli forces in 2012, when large numbers of civilians heeded these warnings and displaced themselves. In this instance, the civilian population has largely stayed in their residences." UNRWA has condemned the use of force by Israeli security forces on Gaza which have caused civilian casualties in violation of international humanitarian law. The agency also asked for urgent funding to cover an expected shortfall of $22 million for its operations. There are currently 1.2 million refugees in eight refugee camps in Gaza, according to the agency.

Rafah crossing with Gaza was closed again by Egyptian authorities, on Friday. The passage had been opened for one day to allow injured Palestinians to seek treatment. "We received orders from the Egyptian authorities to close the Rafah crossing after we partially opened it on Thursday," Iyad al-Buzm, spokesman for Gaza's Ministry of Interior, told Ma'an News Agency.

The decision was condemned by the Ministry, Ma'an reports, as buses and ambulances had been prepared to transport wounded Palestinians via the crossing. Only 11 people were able to make the journey, after Egypt opened Rafah for one day, Thursday, it was added.

During the 2012 assault on Gaza by Israel, Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi had condemned "Israeli aggression", even sending his prime minister to the region in a show of support for Palestinians.

Since Morsi's ousting in July of 2013, Cairo has further strengthened the siege on Gaza, with a focus on tunnels which pass between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, accusing Hamas of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood in attacks which occurred inside Egypt.

The Gaza Strip has been under a crippling economic blockade imposed by Israel since 2006, leading to frequent humanitarian crises. With Egyptian backing, Israel tightened the blockade in 2007, following a political victory by Hamas.

Egypt urged Israel and Hamas, on Wednesday, to end the escalating conflict but ofered no hope of any Cairo-mediated truce.

Egypt's frequent closure of the crossing, the only border through which Palestinians can exit Gaza, has pushed an already dire humanitarian situation in the besieged coastal enclave to its utter limits.

Over 600 Palestinians have been injured in Israel's current assault on the Gaza Strip, according to Ma'an. Hospitals struggle to cope with the growing number of casualties.